Thursday, July 07, 2011

Contains Years of Wisdom and Insight

If you have ever had the yearning to become a Christian screenwriter or actor or producer or director, then you will take years off wasting your time with this book. Dr. Ted Baehr, the Founder and Publisher of Movieguide, has written a comprehensive guide. As he writes in the introduction, "It is a critical time for people of faith to communicate through the mass media of the entertainment industry...This book intends to help you to do just what Jesus commanded: herald His good news in movies and television, the marketplace of entertainment." (Page xxviii)

Dr. Baehr breaks the contents into two main sections: Foundations and Step-by-Step. Each section is loaded with practical yet detailed information into the business. While the author has years of experience, he has reached out to 30 diverse Hollywood experts with stellar credentials. He interweaves these contributors throughout the book and it strengthens the message and impact of the contents.

While this book is loaded with practical information, I want to give one detailed example as a taste of the contents from the chapter, "If It's Not On the Page...":

"Remember that the average movie takes nine years from start to finish. The Passion of the Christ took ten years. Evita took twenty-three years. Batman took seventeen years. There are several reasons why it takes so long. First, there are 300,000 scripts submitted every year to the Writers guild of America and many more are written that are never submitted, aside from the flood of novels every year, but less than three hundred movies open in theaters every year. Thus, most scripts never make it into production. Second, Hollywood movies cost over $104 million to produce and distribute in 2010, and it takes a long, long time to get all the elements together so that some distributor or investor will want to put up this kind of money. Third, most people take years to get the script right. The Los Angeles Times interviewed a woman who was trying to twenty years to sell her script. She said that in all those years she had not had the time to take a scriptwriting course or read a book on scriptwriting. The Los Angeles Times and all of us should be perplexed: What was she doing all that time that she could not take a moment to learn her chosen craft?" (Page 150 to 151)